…if you’re worried about a second Civil War, the question to ask isn’t whether people hate each other — they always have and we tend to grossly exaggerate the extent of this country’s political and cultural unity over time — but whether that hate results from the irreconcilable social and economic interests of opposing groups within the society. If it must be one way or the other, then you might have a conflict on your hands.
That’s where America was with slavery. That’s why our actual Civil War has been called “the impending crisis.” I’m not sure there’s anything in American society right now that plays the same role that the conflict over slavery did. Whatever our current challenges, whatever our current divisions, I do not think the United States is where it was it in 1860. We have enough problems ahead of us already without having to worry about war breaking out here.
I hope Bouie is right, but here's why I'm more pessimistic: The nature of our "impending" Civil War won't be regional like the one in 1861, but more like what we saw in the Balkans in the 90s. The bloody civil strife in the Balkans was driven mostly by hatreds defined by cultural or tribal identities. As Christians and Muslims lived everywhere throughout the Balkans, so do Liberals and Conservatives live everywhere in the U.S. As the Republican Party has become Southernized, its politics of cultural grievance and hatred of the Federal government dominates wherever there are Red counties north or south, east or west.
The American Civil War in the 1860s was on one level about the economics slavery, but it was more deeply about the South's paranoia, and its felt need to defend its cultural identity, an identity that it believed the North wanted to destroy. As then, so now, at least in that respect. Slavery was important economically, but it was more important as an essential component integral for Southern cultural identity. The problem now is that the paranoia is everywhere. It's as bad in Minnesota and Wisconsin as it is in Texas and Alabama.
And then as now, Southern paranoia was rooted in an assumption that in the same way they Whites dominated and destroyed the cultures of the Native Americans during the Jackson era, and in the same way that they dominated and humiliated Blacks and Hispanics since forever, so will the Southernized Right everywhere be dominated and humiliated when they lose political control. Paranoia tends toward prophetic self-fulfillment. Once the last Civil War started, the fear of identity loss that would come with military loss made it so bloody, and made reconstruction once the war ended unsustainable. So are we now facing a similar paranoid social dynamic that gives us good reason to believe that it will lead to bloody strife, although not, I hope, on the scale of the last Civil War.
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It is an open question for me whether Lincoln, as much as I admire the man, was wrong, and it would have been better to let the South go. Maybe it would have been different if Lincoln lived and we avoided a Johnson presidency. Whatever. It went down the way it went down. But without there having been some reconciliation process like the one undertaken in South Africa, the war, for all the lives it cost and the bitterness that it produced, produced little that truly benefited Black Americans. It might have changed their technical federal legal status, but not their local cultural and economic status. And still no voting rights, but a surfeit of lynchings and chain gangs for any Black who gets uppity, and while sharecropping is better than chattel slavery, it was still immiserating peonage.
That finally changed in the 1960s. That's when things started to get better for Blacks but in a way that made many Whites feel that they were losing ground. White resentment about Black success has a long, bloody history, but when black equality started to be enforced by the federal government, this was a bridge too far. Southerners resisted any idea that the federal government had a right force them to change the way they did things–the way their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers did things. Their white fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers, that is.
"It's not about Black people," these Southerners argue. "We love our black people. It's about the principle of state sovereignty." A lot of white southerners have talked themselves into believing this nonsense, but ideas matter even if they have no basis is reality. This b.s. has galvanized an impassioned ideology that the federal government was/is the enemy, that it had/has no legitimacy, except, of course, when their team held power. And that's the goal–to insure their team retains power by any means necessary.
In the meanwhile any tactic that has a shred of a chance to consolidate permanent control of the federal movement is legitimate. This is why so many embrace the stop-the-steal narrative. It doesn't matter whether in fact Biden got the votes. It's not a question of legitimate process, in the same way that it was never about what Hillary did with the emails or whether she was negligent concerning Ben Ghazi or whether Obama was a citizen. The truth doesn't matter; creating a penumbra of illegitimacy does.
Anything is justified on the Trumpist/Bannon Right to prevent their enemies from holding and exercising power over them. Liberal Democrats, a priori, have no legitimacy–or as little legitimacy as carpetbaggers had during reconstruction. The law and the constitution have value for them only insofar as they can use it as a club to bash Liberals. It has zero legitimacy when Liberals use it against them, no matter how technically scrupulous they are in their prosecutions of even the most egregious and flagrant the behavior of their most felonious thugs. To point out that they are inconsistent about that simply makes no sense to them because they don't care about the rule of law except insofar as it reflects the 19th-century social order they want to restore.
The current paranoia started in the sixties. Nixon, Reagan, Atwater, Gingrich, Limbaugh, et al. fanned its flames. Then FOX News in the 90s. Then crazies on the internet and social media in the 2000s. Then Neoliberalism did its disruptive, local culture-destroying thing while releasing an orgy of greed and grifters that brought us to 2008. Then a Black president, and birtherism, and the passionate anti-government incoherence of the Tea Party–all of which sets the stage for the nation's most celebrated of greedy grifters, Donald Trump. Winning the presidency was the biggest grift of all–epic in its ambition and shocking for how easy to achieve. And the grift continues with Stop the Steal. And the grift works because it feeds the paranoia.
This is why I fear the Balkans in the '90s provides a better analogy for what lies before us than our own civil war. To preserve their cultural identity, the White hard right must embrace any strategy, regardless of its basis in the facts, that delegitimates the authority of those who seek to destroy them. This is crazy, of course, but so were the fundamental dynamics that brought us the last Civil War. So was the bloody aftermath of Independence in India. So were the dynamics that drove the bloody insanity in Rwanda.
The loss of centralized constraints provided by the USSR in the Balkans in the 90s is analogous the loss of federal legitimacy in the Red counties throughout the U.S. since the 60s. During the decades the USSR provided constraints against civil strife in the Balkans, ordinary Christians and Muslims got along fine, but once those constraints were removed, the old hatreds came out of their fetid, dark holes to infect people you would never have thought before then were haters. They never thought of themselves as haters. But all of a sudden there they were hating, or abetting the hatred. Our next civil war will be more Bleeding Kansas than Sherman's March through Georgia. It will be more neighbor versus neighbor.
While the loss of constraints has been more gradual in the U.S., we have been seeing the intensity of old hatreds increasing month by month. We're seeing decent people allowing themselves to be infected by hatred in ways that I would not have believed possible ten years ago. The question that yet remains is how deep this fear of identity annihilation runs, and how many will be willing to join a violent movement to fight against those their paranoia has led them to believe want to destroy them.
Policy insofar as it helps ordinary southern whites to solve their problems or improve their lives is irrelevant; politics has relevancy only insofar as it's about insuring that "our people", the people who will defend and protect our cultural identity, are in control. Now as during the run-up to the Civil War, they believe that control of the federal government is/was necessary to insure their cultural survival. And if now as then if aggressive, legal and extra-legal strategies fail to give them permanent control of the federal government, secession will be on the table again.
I don't know how this will play out. You can read David French or Stephen Marche to evaluate the plausibility of the scenarios they present. But I think it's plausible that if it becomes clear to the White hard-Right that complete autocratic control of the federal government is impossible, that won't be the end of it. They will have a Plan B.
I could see a phased strategy of secession being adopted. It would start with consolidations of one-party autocracies in Red-state local governments. I could see militia or terrorist violence in purple states to terrorize citizens into acquiescence to far-right control.
I could see as the next phase as these states where authoritarian control has been consolidated then demanding the right to secede. And when denied, we would start to see an escalation of terrorist violence like the McVeigh bombing in Kansas City, assassinations of prominent Liberal media and political figures, etc. The goal will be to make the cost of preventing secession greater than the cost of letting them go. I don't know if this will work. A lot will depend on the capability of the federal government to respond effectively, and it's not clear that they would be able to do so unless the Democrats commanded significant majorities in the House and Senate.
And that's the more optimistic scenario if the Democrats were to retain power. Worse will be if the Republican Party actually accomplishes on the federal level what it tried to do on 1/6. There are lots of other possibilities, including some that are beyond the scope of our imaginations now. But it's hard to see how this ends well.
Most Liberals cannot believe that any secessionist scenarios could be plausible because they don't feel the irreconcilability of the Red/Blue divide in the way the Red side does. Lincoln right up to the brink believed that most Southerners didn't want the war, that they would come to their senses, that sane, sensible Southerners would bring the hotheads to heel. He was wrong because he was a sane, sensible human being who assumed that most people were like him. He underestimated the power of collective paranoia. And so do I suspect sane, sensible Liberals like Bouie underestimate it. They seem to think that sane future is ours if we stay patient enough. Things will cool down. Maybe. But there's good reason to think that there will be a long, bloody detour before we get there.
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